Brief: What medium do you believe best conveys your voice? How can you connect most closely with your target audience? Create a project that will be conducted in a free format that includes narrative.
For this project I wanted to explore a different style of design, brutalism graphic design, as well as spread awareness about hostile architecture. Hostile architecture is something that is very prominent in our daily lives however it's not very commonly talked about and thus I wanted to make a project that forced people to learn about this aspect of their environment. I chose to do posters that were printed onto cloth because I felt the texture and ability for cloth to be reused and at a way larger scale would be to my advantage. I wanted to place these posters on the street forcing people to walk on/over them or have their path obstructed by these posters. This feeling of obstruction or forcefulness, information gain, was something that I really wanted the viewer to feel because the houseless people who are targeted by hostile architecture are feeling that just from our everyday environment. For the posters I used some imagery of hostile architecture that was slightly distorted as well as large headers for each poster topic. Then in the body text explained more in depth what hostile architecture was, how it is affecting people and who it is targeting.
Additionally I made a sticker based on each poster, three in total, and placed them on pieces of hostile architecture. The stickers as well as the posters I kept black and white because I really wanted people to focus on the imagery and content that they were receiving.
Brokesh, Taylor, and Author: Taylor Brokesh. “Hostile Architecture Remains an Issue for Boston, Cambridge’s Unhoused.” The Daily Free Press, 7 Apr. 2021, dailyfreepress.com/2021/04/07/hostile-architecture-remains-an-issue-for-boston-cambridges-unhoused/.
“Understanding Hostile Architecture: The Cause and Effect of Restricting Public Space.” The Neighborhood Design Center, 2023, ndc-md.org/news-and-stories/understanding-hostile-architecture-the-cause-and-effect-of-restricting.